Five Years Ago Today...

I sold my first book. Among writers, it's called getting THE CALL.

There's no other way to refer to it but in capital letters. :-) You wait and wait and write and write, and hope and pray and eventually, hopefully, someone loves your little written baby enough to buy it.

Those of you interested in the long version of the story can read it on my website, but here's the little tidbits I left out. The funny parts, essentially, about THE CALL.

My agent called me at 3:33 in the afternoon on December 12, 2001. It was an Advent Wednesday, which meant my kids (who go to a parochial school) had to go sing songs and read little lines telling the story of Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus. So, I got THE CALL, got to dance around my house for about five seconds, grab the kids at school, tell said kids, dance some more (who were then 3 and 8, so they were quite unimpressed, let me tell you, and just a tad embarrassed by Mom's dancing...well, almost everyone I know is embarrassed when I dance), feed everyone something fast, then run to church.

We sat through the story of the Nativity, sang "Silent Night" and a bunch of other hymns that I don't remember now, and then I got a chance to tell my husband the whole long story. For a celebration, we went to...

Drum roll...

Applebee's.

LOL. We're a family. We had small kids. We had to choose a place that came with crayons. So, Applebee's it was. I'd already eaten something that was likely hot dogs and fries with the kids, so I had a glass of wine and a dessert, toasted my new success, then went home, expecting to become Barbara Cartland.

The epilogue to that story was in my Shh...Let's Not Tell the Dog blog post over at Romancing the Blog. Ah, it's no wonder I write comedies ;-)

Long story short, that book I sold became THE VIRGIN'S PROPOSAL, it launched a whole career, and now I'm looking at my 14th book on shelves. Not a bad way to celebrate five years :-)

Thanks for reading,

Shirley